The Wild Places is both an intellectual and a physical journey, and Macfarlane travels in time as well as space. Guided by monks, questers, scientists, philosophers, poets and artists, both living and dead, he explores our changing ideas of the wild. From the cliffs of Cape Wrath to the holloways of Dorset, the storm-beaches of Norfolk, the salt marshes and estuaries of Essex and the moors of Rannoch and the Pennines, his journeys become the conductors of people and cultures, past and present, who have had intense relationships with these places. Certain birds, animals, trees and objects - snow-hares, falcons, beeches, crows, suns, white stones - recur, and as it progresses this densely patterned book begins to bind tighter and tighter. At once a wonder voyage, an adventure story, an exercise in visionary cartography, and a work of natural history, The Wild Places is written in a style and a form as unusual as the places with which it is concerned. It also tells the story of a friendship, and of a loss. It mixes history, memory and landscape in a strange and beautiful evocation of wildness and its vital importance.

'A love song to these islands, an elegant and heartfelt testimony to the value of landscape that we remain in acute danger of destroying forever' Observer

About the Author
Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), won the Guardian First Book Award, The Somerset Maugham Award, and The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and was filmed by the BBC. It was also short-listed for the Ondaatje Prize for the Literature of Place, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Boardman-Tasker Prize for Mountaineering Literature, the Banff Mountain Literature Award, and long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. It was acclaimed as 'one of the two most important books written around the experience of mountains in the past fifty years'. Robert Macfarlane is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He lives in Cambridge with his family.

Reviews
?A formidable consideration by a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence ? poetry, really ? with the breathless ease of a master angler, a writer whose ideas and reach transcend the physical region he explores?the natural world swells with meaning through Macfarlane's devoted observations, which can be both minutely detailed and vast in scope?like the wild it parses, [this book] quietly returns us to ourselves.? ? "The New York Times Book Review" ?Inspiring?Macfarlane brings these landscapes to pulsing life?His precision in apprehending the world is a salutary lesson in and of itself?His descriptions have created a new map of Britain and Ireland in my mind. And like pebbles in a pond, those descriptions are now altering the way I look at the world immediately around me.. this is the final gift of Macfarlane's wild places: they illuminate the wild wonder of our everyday world.? ? "National Geographic Traveler" ?" The Wild Places" boldly celebrates places that aren?t


Awards
Short-listed for Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2008 and Independent Booksellers' Week Book of the Year Award: Adults' Book of the Year 2008 and Dolman Best Travel Book of the Year Award 2008 and British Book Awards: Play.com Popular Non-fiction Award 2008.



Book Information
ISBN 9781847080189
Author Robert Macfarlane
Format Paperback
Page Count 352
Imprint Granta Books
Publisher Granta Books
Weight(grams) 246g
Dimensions(mm) 200mm * 130mm * 20mm